travisb

The quote is saying that transmission line capacity is higher when it's windy and lower when it is windless (due to less cooling).

If you assume that EV charging is the marginal load which would put you over the windless capacity, but not the windy capacity, then in order to prevent overload you'd need to prevent EV charging when there is no wind and therefore the transmission capacity is lower.

Taking a step back it's a general problem with this type of optimization, what to do when the system has become accustomed to, and is designed for, capacity which isn't available. How do you get people to use less power in order to avoid a blackout?

As many have noted there are two different scenarios.

In the lottery jackpot/UBI scenario where money is no concern at all I'd camp, fish, read books, and drink whisky.

In the need a job, but every job will pay my asking salary scenario, I'd make software like I do now, but probably for a smaller, less bureaucratic company.

If you had a serial plug-in hybrid with a 20+Kwh battery which also supported exporting 120vac, that would work. AFAIK such a vehicle doesn't exist in North America yet and might not exist anywhere globally.

You start stacking energy efficiency losses (engine -> charger -> battery -> inverter -> charger -> battery -> motor) and economic losses (expensive serial hybrid, higher than expected vehicle battery cycles, still need a large number of tool batteries which wear out in about a year, etc.) though.

Charging using the truck would require running the truck all day -- probably not an acceptable alternative. Consuming 2-10 Kw from a 200 Kw engine would be so inefficient that it'd be too expensive anyways. Instead you'd need to run a generator all day charging batteries.

A fast charging, high capacity tool battery takes at least 60 minutes to charge. In high power applications (lawn mower, leaf blower, chainsaw, etc) those batteries might be emptied in a little as 15 minutes.

A better alternative might be corded 240v tools running directly off the generator for high-power applications. 120v tools are limited to 2-3HP which doesn't compare well to gas engines.

Even doesn't pass the smell test, especially if one considers the data for cotton shopping bags versus plastic.

Per unit length of netting with the equivalent strength, cotton/hemp netting will weigh more, require more frequent replacement, require horrible preservatives which will leach into the marine environment, require more fossil fuels to till and fertilize the cotton, consume more freshwater in production, result in more top soil loss due to mono-cropping, need more pesticides, etc.

Direct plastic pollution in the ocean would be reduced yes, but at the cost of higher pollution and environmental degradation elsewhere.

There is no low hanging fruit when it comes to reducing plastic production or consumption. Plastic is just too awesome -- which is why we use it instead of whatever we used before plastics.

I'm not aware of any major use of plastic where going backwards in time is on-net more environmentally friendly. Most reports discussing plastic replacements make unreasonable reuse and durability assumptions. Often they ignore or downplay consequences of switching like increased transportation pollution or pollution from assumed recycling.

It feels like a deadline because in many ways it *is* a soft deadline.

It is an uncomfortable fact, but at 30 you are about ten years into the productive fifty years of your life. You are about ten years into the thirty years of your life (~20~50) where you can take on major projects, which often take 15-20 years, and be confident you can see them through.

It sounds like over the next two years you need to figure out what you want and what you can accomplish; that is lots of time. However, I wouldn't discount advice the way you do. It's true that people are figuring out where they are, but advice from people who've already passed through where you are in life is informative.

We can look at what's happening in Ukraine right now to see how well that's working. The truth of it is that no matter how much technology is deployed land can only be held with infantry.

Being infantry is still physically demanding and cannot be usefully replaced by technology. Maybe they aren't marching hundreds of kilometres on foot anymore, but they still need to endure the weather, minor injuries, and move through forests carrying heavy packs.

Physically, being infantry is beyond most people in their sixties.

Not needing a sub-panel is almost certainly the reason.

The North American residential electrical code limits how many circuits you can put onto a generator based on the circuit capacity, not the expected use. You aren't allowed to pinky swear that you won't run your electric oven and dry laundry at the same time. It doesn't matter that your generator will just trip its breaker or die.

So if you want to have most of your house on a permanently wired standby generator you need to wildly oversize that generator such that it can entirely replace utility power.

I'm not entirely clear on what your question is, but reused single-use propane canisters are lesser for three reasons.

1. The propane they are manufactured with is carefully dried, but propane out of bulk tanks is not. The single use tanks have thinner walls with less corrosion protection because the high-end propane doesn't need it.

2. The safety over-pressure valve on those tanks has similar design constraints and may corrode shut with un-dried propane. Sometimes people damage those valves while refilling.

3. It's easy to overfill those little tanks such that high temperatures can cause over-pressure problems. Due to (1) and (2) the built-in safety measures for refillable tanks cannot be assumed.

The cheapest way is to find some cheap, food-safe container(s). Put it into your basement and change out the water every 3-6 months.

55 gallon rain barrels can often be found subsidized and therefore cheap.

Keep a bunch of camping iodine drops around and you are set.

The losses are different, but still exist.

In the L3 case there is still a voltage conversion because the input voltage needs to be higher than the battery voltage in order to put energy into the battery. There will be a loss at that stage.

But a big part of the loss during L3 charging is in the battery chemistry. The relatively high charging rate is less efficient than slower charging rates. The high powers involved also generate heat, which often requires active cooling which is an additional reduction in plug-to-wheel efficiency.

In the L1/L2 case there is a conversion from ~240v AC to DC but it's inside the vehicle. Plus the battery chemistry charging losses, but they are much lower than in the L3 case.

These are all ballpark numbers anyhow, so you are welcome to suggest difference values which you believe are supported.

Among other things, security became a concern.

Being lenient is all well and good when the consequences are mild. When the consequences of misinterpreting or interpreting differently to a second implementation becomes costly, such as a security exploit, then the Robustness Principle becomes less obviously a win.

It's important to understand that every implementation will try to fix-up formatting problems in their own way unique to their particular implementation. From that you get various desync or reinterpretation attacks (eg. HTTP request smuggling).

It sounds like you almost have enough numbers to calculate the ball-park efficiency.

Grid -> condo battery ~85% (basically an L2 charger)

Condo battery -> L3 charger let's say ~96%[0] because it's a high discharge rate

L3 charger -> car ~90%

It's simple math now: 0.85 * 0.96 * 0.90 = ~74% end-to-end efficiency.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Energy-efficiency-map-of...

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

You are right that most trips don't need SUVs and pickups, but many families need large-ish, relatively powerful vehicles like the now dead station wagon. But it is uneconomical for car builders to make station wagons, so they don't. Instead everybody who can't fit into an economy car is pushed into an SUV or pickup by practical concerns.

On the other side, large and powerful luxury cars are also not economic for car makers to build, so instead car makers add luxury to large utility models. From there it's a trickle-down of cachet so owning a sedan or hatchback is insufficient for those who need or want to fit in with a higher economic class.

I haven't read the actual bill, but from the news reports it's the former. Right now the inclusion rate is 50%; which more or less means capital gains are effectively taxed at about 27%. On June 25th, 2024 the inclusion rate will be 66% for an effective capital gain taxation rate of around 35%.

None of the payment mechanisms I suggested do anything of the sort. In fact none of them involve a bank at all.

And since the receiver can choose to not cash in the postage, the postage need not be validated at all.

"by their own legal system". The Australian government can come to whatever conclusion it wants about how it deals with its land.

That is, it was the Australian legal system which made that decision and further that decision was not countermanded by the Government of Australia. It wasn't the legal system of, say, Jamaica forcing the Australian Government to do that. Or even the legal system of the peoples who were occupying the territory when the British arrived.

How would it be breaking international law? Who would enforce it? Would the US stop trading with Canada because Canada nullified some treaties with a third party (ie. not the USA)? Would Germany invade Canada?

Treaties are just agreements and are broken all the time; for an obvious example look at trade treaties or weapons treaties. In the Canadian context the constitution states that Canada must maintain those existing treaties with Aboriginal tribes, but constitutions are changeable. Every other treaty is a mere act of Government away from nullification.

Might makes right is how all land is owned. Always has been, always will be.

We've stacked lots of layers of paper and convention on top of that fact to reduce the amount of war we make, but people ignore this basic fact of the world at their peril.

Email is a tottering stack of standards which mostly-but-not-completely solve problems discovered over time. As the article states it would be a good target for a complete rethink, but I don't think any of the solutions presented are promising avenues to explore.

As one example, consider the proposed "recipient stamps". It requires a complex trust configuration, always-on email clients, and synchronizing 'stamp books' across different clients. I expect that makes it intractable in practice.

Better would be 'postage' where each email contains references to one or more payment methods. The receiver and intermediaries can then deduct a fee from any available payment methods at their discretion. Some common postage methods would be a hashcash service, or crypto-currency address, or pre-approved captcha credits, or a service to request a moderately large Internet transfer.

I was speaking to my house builder in the middle of 2023 and he noted that it had become impossible to build a starter house (2/3 bedrooms, 1.5-2 bath) for less than $450k CAD (~$300k USD) -- excluding land, utility connection, and financing costs.

He also mentioned that new requirements going into effect this year were going to add $10-15k per house.

People tend to have a poor grasp on what building a new house actually costs. They cost a lot to build with no gouging whatsoever.

Where I live it costs $1500 to create a new corporate entity and $500/year to file taxes for a trivial corporation.

A limit like that is entirely unworkable against large corporate interests. All it would do is prevent local, small-time landlords from expanding.

The empty homes tax is a joke. It's too easy to bypass (just have somebody you know use it as their primary address and add a few lamps on timers) and priced too low (in many cases the tax is cheaper than the costs of having long term tenants).

There's a few things happening here, but it boils down to EV range being just barely adequate so people are dependent on the range estimate and a 10% error is sometime a serious problem. This is especially true if you need to drive in conditions which disfavour an EV.

To start with, if you are driving a significant fraction of the ideal range, then unexpectedly short range is a problem. Most ICEs have so much range this is never a concern except on long road trips, where refueling is easy and quick.

Then EVs are relatively sensitive to temperature changes. ICEs mostly don't care because they don't have a battery to heat and cabin heat is free. EVs pay for cabin heat with range.

EVs have a negatively proportional efficiency curve with respect to speed and load. That is, the faster you go the less efficient an EV is and the higher the load you are drawing from the battery the less efficient they are. ICEs have a positive proportional efficiency curve. That is, as you increase load to 80% throttle at the given RPM they get more thermally efficient. This makes the net efficiency loss due to high highway speeds less bad as a percentage of 'normal' consumption for ICEs than EVs.

This latter also comes into play if you live somewhere very windy. If you sometimes drive into 80 KM/h head winds, that's relatively a better case for ICEs than EVs. Similarly, if you live somewhere hilly the consumption for driving uphill rises slower in an ICE than an EV. EVs regen on the way down which helps, but only if you have sufficient empty battery capacity on the way down the hill.

If you consider all these and other more minor properties, like the fact that EVs are heavier and often need heavier tires as a result, then EV range is less predictable because it's so efficient already. If an EV is already 95% (of theoretical) efficient, then losing a straight 5% efficiency (95% -> 90%) because it's windy is a big deal. In a 60% (of theoretical) efficient ICE, losing a straight 5% efficiency (60% -> 55%) isn't so bad.

It would be more thermally efficient, but not as economically efficient.

Firstly, consider the capital costs of an engine + natural gas pipeline + heat pump (excluding electrical motor) versus either a natural gas pipeline + burner _or_ a heat pump + electric motor. A high guess on the lifetime of a suitable natural gas engine under consumer quality maintenance (variable and generally late) would be 10,000 runtime hours. On heating duty cycle that's about 5 years. You can reduce runtime hours with more starts and stops, but that reduces the engine life -- probably more than it saves.

So the extra capital costs of the engine must amortize over five years out to less than the lost efficiency. Importing electricity has economies of scale in capital costs. Direct burning of natural gas has low capital costs.

Secondly, there's the efficiency question. A moderate-sized heating system has a peak power of around 100,000 BTU/hr or about 29 KW. That's about 37 horse power. Engines of that size are piston engines with around 20% efficiency. Therefore out of every 5 units of fuel-heat you get 1 unit of mechanical energy you have 4 units of waste heat. That mechanical energy put through a heat pump will net you around 3 units of heat for a total of 7 units of heat for every 5 units of fuel.

That's better than just burning it, but 140% thermal efficiency is only ~45 points better than a natural gas furnace and comes with much higher maintenance costs (oil changes, filters, etc.).

Importing electricity has economies of scale in production, even if generated using natural gas, because the 'engines' are of more efficient types with 40-60% thermal efficiency. Further, an electric motor is low maintenance and long lasting. So for every 5 units of fuel-heat in a power plant you can get between 6 and 9 units of heat through an electrical heat pump. Not too different overall, but with much lower per-house capital and maintenance costs.

So compared to a natural gas furnace it's not a win because of the capital costs and maintenance costs versus the much cheaper equipment; a ~$3000 engine every five years is $600 per year, which buys a lot of natural gas. Compared to an electric heat pump it's not a win because the efficiency of engines that small aren't great.

For the volumes often boiled in kettles, often 0.5l to 1.0l, only if you use a massively oversized pot. But then you need to account of the extra evaporation and greater cookware mass which hurts the induction stove.

Induction power is still limited by pot diameter and common cookware is very heavy for water boiling because other types of cooking need more even heat and higher temperatures.

I actually raced a 120v kettle versus and high-end induction stove to boil 1l and it was very close.

Electric kettles are very well optimized for speed and efficiency.

No, in North America all electric hobs are 240v often 30 amp (sometime higher).

With cooking it's all about efficiency of heat transfer, latency of power change, and flexibility of pan lifting between the three types of hobs (electric resistive, induction, gas).

The efficiency of electric resistive and gas is poor, induction is great.

The latency of power change of electric resistive is poor, induction and gas are great.

Flexibility of pan lifting of electric resistive and induction are poor (lift more than a couple of centimetres and you have no heat), gas is good.

The reason was to avoid tax advantaging sports cars or luxury sedans for executives. At the time SUVs were utilitarian and unfashionable so dividing by weight seemed an easy way to distinguish between "real" work vehicles and "fake" work vehicles.

Of course it backfired so now 6500 pound SUVs (and even luxury sedans!) are easily acquired.

Global outsourcing has been a thing for decades now, and yet there are still software developers in California.

At the end of the day "anywhere on the planet" just isn't true. Language, work culture, time zones, shared educational base, low network latency, and more are all still important in remote work and place strong constraints on how geographically distributed a team can be.

Even splitting a team up between West Coast and East Coast presents difficulties due to time zones -- and that's a case where everything else is more or less identical.